Why universal SEND training matters for FE, and why it can’t stand alone

By Angie Fantis, Teacher of Psychology at BHASVIC and Research Further Scholar

I was delighted to see the government’s announcement of a £200 million, compulsory SEND training programme across not just early years and schools but colleges also. As David Hughes, Chief Executive of the Association of Colleges, rightly noted, this substantial investment should help colleges build on the “brilliant work that they do”. Historically, SEND reform and investment have focused primarily on schools, with the further education sector often receiving less attention in policy and training, and so this really does feel like a positive step forward.

The government is right to identify inconsistency in SEND training as a problem. Evidence from across the sector shows that while many staff are deeply committed to inclusion, too often they may not feel adequately supported in developing their practice. The government states that almost half of primary and secondary teachers feel that more training would help their confidence in supporting SEND pupils, and in research carried out last year, I found that only one in four FE teachers surveyed felt that the SEND training they had received was effective, with 8% stating that they had received none at all (Fantis, 2025). Despite this, the teachers surveyed held positive attitudes towards inclusive education, it was something they believed in and felt strongly about.

This echoes what the government reports, that there is a clear gap in SEND support “for those in-post looking to build their skills further”, with existing training largely focused on those new to the workforce or moving into leadership roles. I was reminded of this last week when I attended an inclusion day for PGCE students at a local university. Sitting in on a session on assistive technology, one of the areas highlighted in the government’s new training offer, I was struck by how confident and well prepared the trainees were. They were exploring approaches to inclusive design, neurodiversity and digital accessibility in ways that simply were not part of my own initial training, when SEND input amounted to just a couple of hours.

This is encouraging and demonstrates how far thinking and practice have progressed. However, it also highlights the emerging gap between what new entrants to the profession are learning and the support available for the existing workforce. Inclusion is improving, but the opportunity to develop alongside these advances is not consistently accessible to all teachers, regardless of sector. The challenge, then, is not whether inclusion has improved, it clearly has, but how we ensure that progress reaches everyone. Without that, we risk creating a two‑tier system, pockets of excellent inclusive practice existing alongside staff who feel underprepared and underconfident, despite their commitment to students. A universal, national SEND training programme has the potential to bridge this divide and bring greater coherence and confidence across the profession.

Bridget Phillipson described the government’s ambition as helping schools move SEND children “from forgotten to included”. The intention is powerful and welcome, a signal that inclusion must be central, not peripheral. While the language gestures to systemic reform, it is still important to be clear about who is doing the forgetting. From the perspective of teachers in our sector, this does not reflect our lived experience. As an autistic educator in the FE sector, I see every day that SEND learners are not forgotten by the professionals who teach and support them. We know exactly who they are. We plan for them, advocate for them, adjust for them and champion them. As David Hughes states: “Colleges across the country do a wonderful job in supporting students with a vast range of abilities to participate and succeed on academic and vocational courses.” The real issue is not that teachers overlook these learners, but that systems do not always include them by design. Teachers are doing everything they can inside structures that do not always flex to meet need.

This is where Critical Disability Studies offers something essential. It reminds us that inclusion is not determined by the attitude or skill of an individual practitioner, however committed they might be. It is a systemic property. Thriving becomes possible when environments, curriculum, funding mechanisms, assessment practices, staffing models and leadership cultures remove barriers, not when individual teachers are asked to compensate for structural shortcomings. While my focus here is on education, broader societal systems also shape the experiences of SEND learners. Colleges cannot be expected to compensate alone for structural barriers that extend far beyond the classroom. That is why this new national training offer, welcome as it is, cannot stand alone. Training must sit within a broader approach that recognises the inherently structural nature of inclusion. If the ambition is genuinely to enable learners with SEND to thrive, then the forthcoming white paper must be as serious about system design as it is about workforce development.

The FE staff I surveyed were overwhelmingly positive about inclusive education. The commitment, motivation and care are already there. What we need now is a system that enables that commitment to translate into equitable outcomes, one in which inclusion is not an individual burden but a collective, adequately resourced, structural reality. This investment is a promising start. The hope now is that policy builds on it in a way that recognises a truth educators already know, learners with SEND do not need to be found, they need to be included, through the intentional design of the systems that surround them.